A Heart of Thanksgiving

You may be seated.

So we're going to take a break from the book of John just this week.

It's Thanksgiving week, and so I thought it'd be quite thematic this week and do a sermon on Thanksgiving.

And so, you know, thinking about that, I ended up probably quite naturally to the story of the ten who were healed of leprosy, which is in Luke chapter 17.

Luke 17 · chapter mention

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read it and then we'll kind of work our way through it a little bit and we'll talk about some other things and hopefully we'll leave here all feeling unbelievably festive and thankful.

Right, hopefully.

Alright, verse 11.

Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee.

And he was going into a village, ten men, as he was going to a village, ten men who had leprosy met him.

They stood at a distance.

They called out in a loud voice, Jesus, master, have pity on us.

And when he saw them, he said, Go show yourselves to the priests.

And as they went, they were cleansed.

One of them, when he saw he was healed, he came back, praising God in a loud voice.

He threw himself at Jesus' feet and he thanked him.

He was a Samaritan.

Jesus asked, Were not all ten cleansed?

Where are the other nine?

Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?

And then he said to him, Rise and go, your faith has made you well.

So leprosy is this disease that somewhat in our country is eradicated, but it's this horrible disease that attacks the nerve cells, and the cells start to not work together.

And there's you begin misuse of your body because you start to lose feeling, and then parts go numb, and eventually parts rot off, fingers and toes and noses, and you get wounds, and that disfigures your body, and in the processes, disfigures your soul.

In biblical times, when you got leprosy, you were because it was so contagious, you got cast out of society.

And you were put in a group with other lepers, and you were just stuck in your disease, in your leprosy altogether.

And you were so cast out that when you walked around, you had to walk around yelling unclean.

So I mean, can you imagine that?

You imagine being diseased, wounded, uh, you know, cast out of your family, cast out of community and friendships, and then even to top that off, if you go walking around anywhere, you have to be yelling at unclean, unclean, as you walk down the street.

You couldn't even speak to anybody.

This is the condition of these ten.

And so they hear about a man.

They hear about Jesus, a healer who's healing.

And maybe at this point you're here and you're going, I'm not even sure about miracles, uh, the whole miracle thing, you know, I love science.

Well, let me just kind of break the barrier here.

I love science too.

And science is wonderful to speaking to the realm of the natural world.

That's what it speaks to.

Miracles are not of the natural world.

So if we say, well, science says miracles don't exist.

Well, science doesn't say that.

Science speaks to the natural world and natural causes.

To say science says miracles don't exist is to make a statement of faith upon science.

And so you've moved into some realm of faith when you make the statement.

And that's a long conversation I'd love to have with you at some point.

But this story for this morning is these ten coming, this condition, unclean, you know, lepers, disease, cast out, and they hear there's a guy who can who's healing.

I mean, can you imagine this?

I mean, the possibility of relief, the possibility that you could rejoin your family, friends, life, could come back.

And so they come and they see him and they they yell from a distance, you know, you know, you know, heal us.

And he says, go show yourself to the priest, because if you got healed, you had to show yourself to the priest.

The priest would sort of validate it, kind of stamp you, you are now clean, you can re-enter our community, our society.

And so they're being healed and they start walking and they start to see that they are they have been healed.

And so what this means, this means fingers are coming back, and toes and noses, and they're high fiving, literally.

All five.

I mean, right?

I mean, they haven't done this in a while.

They've been high two in and three in, and they're high fiving, and maybe that limp because their toes are gone, that limp's gone, they balance, you know, buddy loses the stick as a cane, I mean, they are walking.

I mean, they have become healed.

Can you imagine how excited you would be to go find your loved one, your friend?

That career, that dream you wanted to pursue, and it was, it was, it was off limits.

I mean, all this is now possible.

Where do the other nine go?

I mean, one so one sees this, right?

One sees this and he comes back to Jesus and he's so excited.

I mean, he praise you, thank you, thank you.

The other nine, they move on.

Where did they go?

Well, I was thinking this week, if it wasn't the Middle East, I would think all of them went to buy gloves.

That'd be really exciting to get the gloves back on your hands with your new fingers.

But then the Middle East was warm, so they didn't go do gloves.

They're going to see their family, they're they're moving on.

And it's not really distorted, not really about where they went physically.

The point is, is they just skipped gratitude.

They just kind of went right over it.

And why didn't their hearts find that place of gratitude and thankfulness and thanksgiving?

It's the difference between what's next and what's been given.

Right?

Like, what's next?

I mean, you know, you get healed, what's next?

Right?

I mean, okay, I'm healed, I'm excited about that, but what's next?

And what's been given, just to stop, what's been given to me?

There's this other story, this ancient story in the Old Testament, and it's a story about the Exodus and the people of God, the Israelites, they have they've been in Egypt under slavery, and it's been horrible for generations, about six generations.

It's been horrible.

And they're enslaved and they're, I mean, literally making bricks, and they're sweating, and it's a it's just a bad lie.

They've been crying out to God, please you remember us, will you come, will you help us, will you rescue us?

Finally, in God's timing and God's sovereignty, God through Moses raises up this leader to lead them out of Egypt, and Moses starts talking to Pharaoh, and then God intervenes with some plagues, and some of you remember this story.

Eventually, the gist of the story is the people got out.

God delivered the people out.

So the people move into the desert and they just need to walk.

It's actually not that far of a journey.

They should have made it quickly, but they spent 40 years in this desert, and partially because they forgot God again.

They get in there and they start being self-sufficient again and self-reliant again, and they get into their own ways and they start wandering around.

They just settle in.

They kind of forget what God might have for them in Canaan.

They settle in again.

But with each step, what you see is as though these people are forgetting God, these people are kind of returning back to self-reliance and sufficiency and being proud of themselves.

God keeps providing for them at each step.

You know, they're hungry, God provides food.

I mean, each step God is providing.

After Moses, he raises up another leader, Joshua, who eventually leads the people into Canaan to the land that they have been promised, their land, where they belong, their home.

We get this passage in Deuteronomy about the Exodus.

I love this passage.

It just talks about how we tend to move on out of gratitude to what's next.

Verse 8, Deuteronomy 8, verse 15 through 18.

Deuteronomy 8:15–18

He, God, led you through the vast and dreadful wilderness, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions.

He brought you water out of a hard rock.

He gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never known, to humble and test you, so that in the end it might go well with you.

You may say to yourself, My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.

But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors as it is today.

Well, where'd the lepers go?

Same place these people went in Deuteronomy, same place we go.

They just they just moved on.

I mean, it's just so easy to start to think, you know, are there the good things in my life, and maybe even my faith to some extent, and maybe my success within my faith, and you know, start to think, well, you know, I'm I'm I'm doing pretty good.

I'm sort of handling this.

I've provided, I'm doing.

The question here, the point here is remember the Lord, for He gives you even the ability to produce the wealth.

He gives you even the ability to have a walk of faith.

He gives you the ability to even do any of that.

We are receivers.

God is the giver.

And it's just so easy between the what's next and what's been given, just to always go to what's next.

I mean, and this is about us having to form some sort of hard position of refusing to forget.

The good we've received, the healing we've received, the forgiveness, the righteousness, what Jesus did on the cross for us, that he took our sin and gave us his righteousness.

We refuse to forget any of that.

And it's very hard in our culture.

I mean, we have a culture, right, that we are in.

It's not like them, those bad people out there.

We are in this and we form what could be possibly one of the most holy days of the year, Thanksgiving, I would consider it one of the most holy days of the year, a day that we have decided we will stop everything and just thank God for family, for food, for shelter, for education, for our ability.

And we will follow that with Black Friday.

We will follow that with the most consumeristic day possible.

And even more so, what we'll do is we're gonna leak it back into Thanksgiving.

Right?

We're just gonna actually take that away.

So, like this idea of what's been given to us, we're just gonna even, we're gonna even just kind of like forget about that totally and just be consumed with what's next.

We can't even do a day of it in our culture.

But people of God have got to remember.

And it's not just about days, right?

I mean, it's about a heart position, whether it's Thanksgiving Thursday and you're at a meal with your family or friends, or whether you're just even by yourself and you're having a thankful day, a day of just contemplating gratitude toward God, or whether it's the next day and you're shopping, it's still a heart of gratitude.

We come back to this leper, and there's only one came back.

Just one.

And I think that shows you how easy human nature is to move on to the what's next.

That one came back.

And with a loud voice, and I was listening to a sermon this week on this passage, and the the preacher was saying that you know he called this the double wow.

The first wow was wow, I'm healed, wow.

Fingers, you know, toes, I'm healed.

Wow, all ten, all ten, wow.

And then one came back for the double while, the second while to come back to the one who healed and said, Wow, thank you.

Praise you.

Thank you.

Thinking about this week and 1 Corinthians 4 7 just came to mind, thinking about this passage, thinking about that Deuteronomy passage, 1 Corinthians 4 7.

What do you have that you did not receive?

And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?

Right?

Like we boast in the Lord.

We boast in the giver of the ability, of the strength, of the life.

When I was 12 years old, I lived in this neighborhood called Plantation Woods.

It's off Highway 29 in Larchville, in between Larchville and Lilburn, and we had a little swim club, and it was kind of your classic middle class neighborhood.

And we had a group of friends, and we went every day, the routine was the same.

You had swim practice, you came home, you watched the prices right, you did your chores, you made a grilled cheese sandwich, and then you went back to the swimming pool in the afternoon.

And then after swimming, you might play tennis on tennis courts, there's a playground, there's a basketball hoop, we had a you know a field to play soccer on.

I mean, but you know, but about halfway through the summer, I mean, it was just, it was just, we knew our friends in Cooper's Pond, and Cooper's Pond was was that was where it was at was Cooper's Pond, this other neighborhood, and we had been there, we had friends there, I'd spent the night there, and I had friend Jonathan and Cameron Gadd, they lived in Cooper's Pond, and I just we knew we could imagine it was a nicer neighborhood.

It was kind of the rich kid neighborhood we knew.

Man, they had a full court basketball court, and they had this unbelievable pool, and there's so many cool kids that lived in that neighborhood.

We just knew, man, they must be killing it on a summer day.

And so we start talking together, and we're 12 years old, and we decide we're gonna go for it.

This is way out of bounds.

Remember you had your boundaries, your parents said, well, it was Payton, for me it was Payton Road 29, Oakland Road.

I mean, that was kind of the perimeter there.

That's where you stayed, and we decided we're we're going past.

So we pack our backpacks, and this is pre-helmet, so we're just on our bikes with our our backpacks, and so we get a little food, we have our water, we have our swimsuit, you know, we got basketball in case we play basketball.

I mean, we got everything.

There's about four of us, and so we take off through the neighborhood.

We don't tell our parents, mind you, we're we're we're going to Cooper's Pond, and it's gonna be heaven on earth.

We can just imagine the joy waiting for us.

And so we cross over 29, then it turns into Huff Road, and we cross the road tracks, it turns into Oak Road, and we take that left up the big hill, soccer field was up there, where I played soccer as a little boy, and and we took up Hutchins Road, and this felt like I can this felt like a journey of a lifetime.

I went on Google Maps this week to see how far it was four miles.

That's how far it was.

It felt so far.

It felt like I was rebelling, like you wouldn't believe.

I mean, just out of bounds, not only out of bounds, I mean, we were going into a different town.

I mean, it was so far away.

We get there and we we pull up to the pool, we don't see any of our friends.

Nobody's on the basketball court.

So we're like, well, we know where a few friends live.

They must all be at somebody's house, right?

I mean, they're because they are all here having the time of their life, so much more fun than we could ever have at Plantation Woods, mind you.

And so we ride around to a few people's homes and they're they're not home.

There's nothing going on.

Nothing.

And we knew it was going to be so much better.

When we got there, it was pretty much the same.

Here's this is the difference between what's next and what's been given.

When you live in the what's next, this is what happens sort of repeatedly.

You get there, and maybe it's good.

Right?

Maybe it's good.

But it just keeps going.

It's perpetual.

And this is why thanksgiving is so important, and this is why even more so, not just a day, but a heart of thanksgiving is so important because what it does is it takes you from this what's next, and it puts you in this place of what's been given to you, which is full of peace and contentment.

Because what it is, is it's a position of humility before the Lord.

That He is the giver and we are the receiver.

And we don't need a lot of stuff, but it's enough.

Thank you for what you've given me.

So, sort of closing points, I was trying to give some points to feel like a preacher.

Uh the first point was thankfulness is about remembering who we are, who we were, who God is, what he's given to us.

And this remembering, this thankfulness, this actually glorifies God because what it does is it exalts him.

This is what this story's about, this leper.

The man comes back and praises Jesus and glorifies Jesus as the healer.

It doesn't just forget and move on.

He comes back and glorifies.

I've actually the last couple days been worried about this sermon because I haven't felt thankful at all.

Friday, our dog Thomas, he's been sick for about a week, I think even the last sermon I mentioned he was sick.

Well, he just kept being sick and sick and just getting feeble, and so finally we took him Friday and he had x-rays of his chest, and we were thinking or hoping that he'd eaten something.

And he has a mass in his next to his stomach.

It's the size of his stomach next to his stomach, and tomorrow we go to get an ultrasound and figure out if it's cancerous and everything that's going on.

So Thomas is about seven and a half, he's my buddy.

I mean, I spend more time with Thomas than I do any human being.

I mean, he's just with me all day.

I mean, we have walked literally thousands of miles together.

I mean, he's with me all day.

He's when I'm when I'm working at my desk, he's right beside me.

When I'm at home, he's beside me.

I mean, he's it's like it's like an arm is gonna disappear if something happens to this dog.

And so I have not felt thankful.

I've been very sad, and I'm still sad.

And I'm trying to learn how you are sad and thankful at the same time.

And I I just I just have not, you know, I'm thinking about this leper, I'm going, man, I'm the next nine, because all I'm thinking about is thinking about what I might lose, and uh I'm not the one coming back.

And and last night I was driving the girls home from somewhere, and and I just started to think about 20 years ago, I was 14 years old.

It was Thanksgiving.

We're sitting around the table, my whole family, my grandfather was there, and he had cancer.

He was he was dying of cancer.

It was during the Thanksgiving season, and that week was particularly bad, and I can remember sitting there next to him, and I can remember being at the meal, and I remember he he he he lost control of his bladder even at the table, and I can remember him looking at me and just apologizing, the dignity, you know, and this cancer stealing something, right?

And and you're not feeling real thankful, right?

And he died shortly after.

What I remember looking back on that week 20 years ago, is I I remember lots of tears.

My aunt and uncle were in from out of town.

I was in ninth grade.

I can remember lots of tears, and I can remember being very frustrated.

But I I can remember a lot of love too.

I mean, so so I have this opportunity to to either feel ripped off by cancer, to feel ripped off that you know my grandfather never met.

My wife can remember all the days when he would drive hard the boat and I would just hear he would drive all day.

Just because he loved me.

That makes me so thankful.

And you know, and I can remember something else.

I can remember that uh I can remember all seeing him again.

I can remember that uh no ultimately good thing forged in the heart of God can be taken from us.

None of it.

We will get it all back in the place that we were headed when we all pass away.

I mean, and that that brought unbelievable thanks and thanksgiving to my heart.

That God is sovereign over all of this.

The difficult, the horrible, the bad we don't understand, the bad He redeems, the good we fully understand, and we love that He is sovereign over all of this, and even in that, even then when we're sad and that we're frustrated in that, that we can give thanks in that.

It's easy, sort of, at the end of a sermon on Thanksgiving, to feel like, well, I'm not thankful enough.

I'm miserable, I'm spoiled, I'm a brat.

I mean, it's easy to get there and to do that.

Here's the amazing thing about this story with the leper Jesus didn't retract the healing.

I mean, it's sort of what maybe what I would have done today.

Well, they're not thankful.

Well, you know, I'll just uh I'll just pull a Mac.

Teach them a lesson.

He doesn't retract the healing.

Because he is faithful.

Even when we're not faithful, he is faithful.

Here's the point.

The point is, is even in our kind of consumeristic what's next mentality and position of our heart, he loves us.

And he is faithful.

And if we have guilt, if we have guilt, we're not thankful enough.

If we have guilt, what we do is we we we let it only drive us to grace that's been given to us, and then that grace is what creates gratitude back.

So it's it's guilt, grace, gratitude.

I read this quote just in closing, this quote by G.K.

Chesterton this week.

You say grace before meals, all right.

But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play, grace before I open a book, grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing, and grace before I dip the pen and the ink.

Let's pray together.

God, would you give us grateful hearts that we don't have?

Would you help us to see in difficult things your redemptive hand?

Would you help us to have the faith even when difficult things show no sign of redemption?

Would we have faith that you are still faithful and we're gonna get it back?

That which is in the kingdom of God will get it back.

God, would you give us thankful hearts that move away from what's next back to this place of what's been given?

And that you've been so good.

So good to us.

Even if we don't have family, we have food, we have shelter, with education, we have possibility.

You've been so good to us.

Most of us have family, and we're unbelievably thankful for that.

We have community, we have a church, we have a building, we have a roof, we have a car, we have breath.

We have your healing in our lives.

Though we are not righteous, we are righteous for this.

We're unbelievably thankful.

That you have healed our hearts from the disease of sin.

That position positionally we are secure with you and we don't have to worry about it.

That Jesus is enough.

In that remnant of sin that's still in us, would you would you continue to work?

Would you continue to give us the faith to move away from the what's next back to the what's been given?

And that we would we would live and breathe gratitude back to you.

I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.